Harvey, the Left, and ‘Environmental Racism’

As surely as the thunderclap follows a flash of lightning, it was inevitable that the inescapable human misery brought about by Hurricane Harvey would result in further baseless accusations of racism on the part of those on the left against President Donald Trump, as well as allegations of institutional racism as a pervasive influence in America. At present, it may be too early to tell how far this could go, but there’s every indication that the option of a full-blown defamation campaign is still on the table.

Why might one anticipate such an outcome? As I articulated last week, leftists have demonstrated that they are determined to associate alleged racism with just about anything they can, particularly if it will aid them in characterizing President Trump as a racist. On August 25, the Daily Kos suggested that the hurricane itself might be racist, since it was “poised to disproportionately impact blacks in Texas,” and that the story was somehow being covered up. Apparently, President Trump’s failure to expeditiously fill leadership vacancies at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees FEMA and the Coast Guard) is also part of this conspiracy.

Another conspiracy: Citing the catch phrase “environmental racism” several times, the Huffington Post said on Tuesday that flooding in Houston typically “hits poor, nonwhite neighborhoods hardest” because nonwhite residents have been deliberately crowded into neighborhoods that are most likely to flood. Who knew?
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), who represents Texas’ predominantly black 18th District, is a caricature of the black Democrat politician and has seldom missed an opportunity to decry institutional racism where there’s been no indication of such a problem.

In 2011, Lee claimed that Republican members of Congress were making it difficult for President Obama to raise the debt ceiling because of his race. Earlier this year, she demanded that Congress to call for federal civil rights investigations into the hanging of bananas from nooses at American University in Washington, which civil rights activists associated with a black woman having ascended to the position of student body president for the first time in that school’s history.

As we know, several similar occurrences in the recent past were ultimately attributed to leftist agitators rather than white racists.

Early this week, as a downgraded Hurricane Harvey stalled off of the Texas coast after making landfall over the weekend, Rep. Lee urged President Trump to declare a state of disaster ahead of the storm This was admittedly somewhat alarmist at that point in time, but obviously doesn’t rise to the level of race-baiting. On Friday, Lee’s office said that it was “too early to draw conclusions on the President’s response” to the hurricane (which had yet to make landfall at that time), suggesting that the congresswoman was anticipating Trump’s response to the storm with a jaded eye.

It may appear cynical on my part, but it would not take too much misfortune coming the way of black Houston dwellers (or any blacks in the hurricane’s path) for Rep. Lee or other prominent liberals to mobilize the activist community in the cause of blaming President Trump for said misfortune.

This very thing occurred in August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. In that instance, the state and the local government under black New Orleans mayor Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr. dismally failed that city’s residents, but the blame for black denizens’ suffering was placed squarely on the shoulders of President George W. Bush. Black activists, liberal politicians, and celebrities came out in force to accuse Bush of everything from delaying aid to the city to having employed black ops technology to generate the killer hurricane in the first place.
Two days ago, eight members of President Donald Trump’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) resigned, ostensibly over his response to recent race-related incidents in Charlottesville, Virginia. This was a pretext, of course, in the ongoing drive on the part of Washington establishment types to characterize the president as a racist.

“When asked about the horrific violence in Charlottesville, you failed to denounce the intolerance and violence of hate groups, instead offering false equivalences and attacking the motives of the CEOs who had resigned from their advisory roles in protest,” the council members said in a resignation letter to Trump.

Last week, I also said that since white nationalists possess a miniscule amount of political clout in America compared to the political left, it is folly to consider them a serious threat, particularly since it is the latter who’ve been calculatedly compromising Americans’ liberties. From their proclivity to employ Orwellian levels of propaganda and social engineering, to rewriting history (in their campaigns to remove Confederate monuments from public display, for example), to their penchant for violence, they are clearly the ones embracing deceit, terror, and tyranny.

The dangerous irony here is that those on the left, from progressives to hard-line radicals, have been exploiting their First Amendment liberties in order to neutralize those very liberties as regards their fellow Americans. I have repeatedly cited this fact as justification for disregarding these liberties where it applies to the left – if not concerning policy, at least in principle.

So, how might a political party, an administration, or a voting bloc go about politically disenfranchising the left? That’s the question every right-of-center individual in America ought to be giving the deepest consideration at this juncture.